Some differences can be explained. Pacman was created after the Debian package manager (I guess that because Debian is older than Arch) . It is justified because Pacman is faster than Apt. But its too much work to replace Apt by Pacman comparing to the benefits.
But in some cases I don't know why. As instance I wonder why a distro, such as Void, created its own package manager instead of using the Alpine one. If Alpine is younger than Void, invert the sentence of course.
I like that for Windows phones. I still have one. Screen space is saved. You choose the app you want on the main screen from a clean list instead of an icon profusion. Nowadays all phones interfaces are the same and less good than the Windows Phone interface.
Its cool on phones, but I admit, I don't need that on PC.
I customize the shell prompt in the PS1 variable. Its unpleasant to work with that unreadable language, but I do that once for years and I reuse it across distros.
Distraction free, command autocompletion, Vim-like control is optional.
I learned most of the commands by just opening the mini buffer (alt-x) then tab to watch the autocompletion list.
I want to add an advice to the other answers. You can get a vertical menu with Rofi. Its easy to make it nice. You can config a button in the bar on any bar, I'm not sure about Gnome and KDE bars.
Ok, my sentence was unfair. What I meant is Wlroots is not standard as Xorg.
Wayland has 3 "Xorgs" with eventually their own extensions that can hurt portablity between DEs/WM. Whats the point of a protocol if it doesn't ensure your app will work on all Wayland ?
You are too sensible. He just said Wayland doesn't rock, and its just a fact.
If Wayland "rocks" why it need much more work to implement a WM ? (please don't talk me about wlroots, its not part of Wayland), and in the end it fragments Linux desktop !
Wayland will replace X but it is not a brillant project.
The road blocks I encountered on Kak are, copy paste from other applications, remembering the mode I'm in (like the other modal editors), the language for config and plugins, removing clippy. Finally I was back on Howl but I admit, Kakoune was mind-blowing.
I don't know the Windows state currently, but at the time I switched, I liked the following.
Linux is just a kernel. The user can choose between different components. You'll see some hot discussions because of that. But user friendly distributions can do these choices for you.
Linux is transparent. As an open source software its harder to harm user privacy.
Its frustrating because Alpine gave me the fastest desktop. I dropped Alpine because some apps requires Glibc extensions !